Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Chapter 14. Advanced Version Control

Introduction

Version control systems, also known as source control and revision control systems, are designed to allow organizations to maintain a complete history of every change made to their applications, including source code, documentation, database definitions, build scripts, tests, and so forth. However, they also serve another important purpose: They enable teams to work together on separate parts of an application while maintaining a system of record—the definitive codebase of the application.

Once your team grows beyond a handful of developers, it becomes hard to have many people working full-time on the same version control repository. People break each other’s functionality by mistake, and generally ...